A New Oracle Communications Blog!
Our goal with this blog is to provide information about the documentation and curriculum we release, give you insights into how we create our content, and elicit feedback from you that will help improve the content we deliver (such as through our feedback email alias cgbu_docfeedback_us_grp@oracle.com). In this issue, I’ll introduce the Oracle Communications Information Development team as well as talk about one of our initiatives for this fiscal year: audience awareness. I’ll also let you know how you can give us your feedback.
First, here’s the mission statement of our team:
The Oracle Communications Information Development team is dedicated to delivering quality, concise, thorough, and accurate product documentation and courseware that enable Oracle customers and users to accomplish their goals.
And our operating principles:
- We know our audiences and the tasks they perform.
- Our content allows all users to understand, plan implementation of, install, configure, use, customize, integrate, extend, administer, and test our products.
- Our content is user-goal-oriented and task-based.
- Our processes and templates enable the accurate planning and efficient execution of our deliverables.
- Our content is technically accurate, well written, and well organized. Our documentation adheres to our documentation architectural standards, and our curriculum is instructionally sound and adheres to our curriculum strategy.
- We adopt Oracle styles and standards to have a common development environment and deliver consistent content. We agree on exceptions based on the application or business drivers.
- We make a conscious effort to continuously improve the quality of the content we deliver.
Our team consists of more than 55 technical writers, curriculum developers, documentation and help architects, production specialists, and managers. We’re a global team, with team members located in most of our development sites around the world.
The Oracle Communications team is a merging of many team members from the various companies and assets Oracle has acquired:
- 2006 Portal Software – Billing and Revenue Management
- 2007 MetaSolv – various OSS products
- 2008 Netsure – Network Intelligence
- 2009 BEA assets – Converged Application Server and Services Gatekeeper
- 2009 Sophoi – Intellectual Property Management
- 2009 Convergin – Services Broker
- 2009 eServ assets – Network Charging and Control
- 2010 Sun assets – Unified Communications Suite
With documentation and curriculum from so many different acquired companies coming into Oracle Communications, we saw quite a bit of variance on the organization, style, and format, which we’re working to address. Over the last few years, we have defined common doc architecture; adopted common standards, styles, and development processes; and adopted Oracle standard authoring tools and publishing systems for many of our products.
During this fiscal year, one of our initiatives is customer awareness. We believe that the more we know about our customers (both external to Oracle and internal to Oracle such as our Support, Pre-Sales, and Consulting teams), the more we will be able to target information properly. Here are some of the activities related to this initiative:
Audience analysis. We are currently working on audience analyses that list each of the audience types, their level of information about the domain/product, what tasks they perform, and the information required for them to do their jobs. We validate this information with the product and field teams and then use it as a guide. Our common documentation architecture uses this information to ensure the organization of our doc sets is in line with the various audiences and where they would expect to find documentation.
Knowing how to write for our audiences. We also want to make sure that our team knows how to write for various audiences, so our Documentation Architect, Scott Miller, is writing some guidelines for this and we will do some training of our team members.
Attend audience calls/activities. Another part of our initiative is to work with our product management teams to attend customer and internal field calls, participate in Customer Advisory Board (CAB) and Oracle OpenWorld meetings, and attend internal transfers of information and product training. The goal of attending and participating in these events is to increase the Oracle Communications Information Development team's interaction with participants to better understand their needs. With this understanding, we can improve the way we create content so that those needs are better met. We have created a documentation survey that we plan to use during our interactions with our audience members as a way to learn more about their expectations regarding content.
And last, we value your feedback. You can either respond to this blog or contact the Oracle Communications Information Development using our email alias:
We welcome your direct feedback about our documentation and curriculum and commit to addressing your concerns. As our mission statement says, our goal is to enable you!